PSA: anyone wondering what's up with my blog today … root filesystem ran out of space because I'm an eedjit and didn't notice a build-up of logfiles over the past 3-4 years.
Overdue housekeeping now in progress, blog should be back up in an hour or two. (I do not hold with system administration by "rm -rf", and it takes time to compress and archive/analyse/decide to definitely dispose of 190Gb of logs.)
@cstross it's a dilemma, but I think it's like boxes when moving house. If you haven't unpacked them after a year, you probably don't need what's in them.
I suppose you could apply tax rules: keep everything for 8 years (or whatever the rules are in the UK) and throw the rest away
Another perspective:
I didn't have any access to the machine running my #GOPHER server for almost 3 years; but I had it configured with properly size-capped logs. (logrotate does not in fact guarantee strict size capping.)
I finally got some of the access back, this week. It's been quietly soldiering on since COVID-19, unattended.
JdeBP ~ $du -sh /var/log/sv/gopher4d/
22.4M /var/log/sv/gopher4d/
JdeBP ~ $
/var/log is not on the root volume, of course.
Not mine, and it's been on Hacker News numerous times, too, and others from StackExchange to Wikipedia.
Logging is strictly size capped through tooling that does this, properly. Bloating is not possible. I lose an old log file from 2016 to make way for new entries in 2023 when the size cap is reached. (That's how far back the http4d server logs happen to go right now.)
Charlie Stross
David Emmett
JdeBP